Matthew 24:34 reads "Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till ALL these things be fulfilled." Which generation? Hal Lindsey had us believe it was our generation!
Back when Hal Lindsay wrote The Late Great Planet Earth, Israel's foundation (1948) was still recent history. Lindsey wrote that a "biblical generation" at that time was forty years in length. Thus, with the reestablishment of the Nation of Israel, the expectation was that the Tribulation and Christ's Return would occur within a biblical generation, IE within Lindsey's readers' lifetimes (1988 occurring forty years - one generation - after the reestablishment of Israel). Now two more decades have passed, the EU has grown beyond 10 members, the Soviet Bear has fallen, and last time I looked, I don't have a UPC bar-code tattooed on my forehead (or a techno-ID chip implanted in hand) and every car I see on the highway still has a driver. Either someone forgot to set the alarm on that prophetic clock, or Lindsey, LaHaye & co. just kept hitting the snooze button, hoping we'd forget about 1988 coming and going.
Fast forward to 2006. It's been almost sixty years since the foundation of Israel. Assuming the Rapture hits tomorrow, and the dispensational eschatology holds up, you still need to tack on an additional seven years to account for the Tribulation period before a pretrib Second Coming. Thus, either the biblical length of a "generation" is greater than 58 years and growing (assuming pretrib rapture, 65+ years if posttrib), or the old-school dispensationalists have badly misjudged which prophetic time period we're living in, and thus badly misunderstood Matthew 24:34.
In case nobody was looking, Lindsey's already spinning his failures into (future) successes by changing the way he calculates the Second Coming. Rather than begin calculations from the (formerly significant) 1948 (re)founding of Israel, Lindsey now starts with a young earth scenario, with the Earth being formed around 4000 b.c. His new math system now tells us a day is a thousand years, and thus he'd have us believe we're somewhere between 992 years away ("eight years into") and 1004 years away ("four years before") from the Second Coming (yes, his math is that precise). By date-setting the "Second Coming" date to about 1000 years in the future, it's now far ahead enough for Lindsey to avoid dying of embarrassment, should he miscalculate the date again.
In other words, Lindsey knows he was wrong about the 1988 date, but doesn't want to admit it in print. I wonder if Tommy Ice got the memo?
I never got that.
I always got that it "COULD" be our generation.
Still could be. Jesus said to "Watch for you don't know when the Son of Man comes."
You'd better fault Jesus, too.
Lindsey recycles books and wives as each ages out. I don't know how many times he's re-written his 70's stuff, changing the casts while leaving the plotlines. I have read that he's on marriage number four.
If you hadn't noticed, this is similar to the approach to interpreting the Bible that got another famous datesetter, Harold Camping, in trouble. See his book 1994?.
***In case nobody was looking, Lindsey's already spinning his failures into (future) successes by changing the way he calculates the Second Coming. Rather than begin calculations from the (formerly significant) 1948 ...***
And some are re-calculating from the 1967 war instead of 1948.
We need to get back to learning what God has for us today and not some future day.